As we near Easter, questions about a possible religious revival, and where the narrative and the data agree and clash, have been debated this past week.
The U.S. is, after all, getting more religious, according to Ryan Burge. He analyzed new data from the Cooperative Election Study and found that the share of nonreligious Americans dropped again in 2025, making it a third consecutive year of decline.
After peaking in the early 2020s, the proportion of nones (those who claim no religious affiliation) fell from 36.2% in 2022 to 31.8% in 2025. It also revealed that all three subgroups of the non-religious — atheists, agnostics and those who identify as “nothing in particular”— are shrinking, with the latter category still making up the largest share.
Also last week, evidence for a revival took a hit. The Bible Society released a report, “Quiet Revival,” based on YouGov data suggesting that young people — especially men — were driving a resurgence in church attendance in Britain. But the organization later withdrew the report. “It was only at the beginning of March that YouGov confirmed that it failed to activate key quality control technologies that protect the sample from a wide range of errors and this undermines the reliability of the results,” the statement said.
The signs of religious vitality persist, particularly within Catholicism. Churches are preparing to receive a wave of new converts this Easter. In France, there has been “the largest number of adult converts to Catholicism in living memory,” Justin Brierley, a British Christian author, wrote this week. Spain, Sweden and Norway are also seeing increases in membership. “None of these figures amounts to a ‘revival,’” he wrote. “But they are reliable data points and indicate that something is happening.”
In the U.S., too, something is happening, according to the New York Times. The data gathered from two dozen dioceses, including both large hubs like Los Angeles and Phoenix, and smaller ones like Gallup, New Mexico, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, all pointed to a significant increase in converts. The story outlined a slew of reasons why people join: comfort amid uncertainty, a pull toward a spiritual discipline, a connection with community.
Finally, Ross Douthat brought some helpful perspective to make sense of these mixed signals. He wrote that the “revivalist” and “non-revivalist” trends reflect two different dynamics unfolding at the same time: conversion and retention. The surge in adult conversions and renewed spiritual interest can be explained by a revival among people who are actively choosing faith, often in response to cultural disruption or personal searching. Whereas, he notes, it’s harder to feel that fire of conversion from within the faith.
But the broader data is not reflecting the new conversions — the long-term growth or decline of a religion, he writes, depends less on attracting converts and more on whether its members are having children and if those children will stay in the faith as they grow up.
“In such a moment, it’s entirely possible to have a spirit of revival or intensified belief among the restless and spiritually curious — yet also a continued decline in religious practice among cradle believers. (And as birthrates drop, a decline in the number of people born into a religion, period.),” he writes.
This way, a church can gain highly motivated new adherents even as it loses larger numbers of cradle believers, making it possible for visible enthusiasm and institutional decline to exist at the same time.
Fresh off the press:
- In my Deseret Magazine cover story for the April issue — which is also the Faith issue — I dove into the effort, spearheaded by many believers, to shape AI’s ethics and values before it’s too late. I got to travel to Rome to learn about Matthew Harvey Sanders’ ambitious project of building a Catholic AI and Gloo’s benchmarks that measure how well AI models align with building a flourishing, faith-filled life.
- In another new story, I took a close look at the rise of the Latter-day Saint influencer — a growing group of younger millennials and Gen Z who are building their social media presence around their faith and are setting the record straight on their faith’s teachings where popular media gets it wrong.
Anticipating Easter in Ukraine
I’ve been in Kyiv, Ukraine, for the past few days. It’s been chilly and overcast, but the residents appear to be determined to welcome spring — mothers are strolling with strollers (Ukrainians believe in the health benefits of outdoor naps for their babies); there are always people walking dogs and filling benches in my neighborhood park. But despite perceived normalcy, the heaviness of war underlies every conversation.
On Sunday, I attended a Latter-day Saint branch in central Kyiv. The congregation has dwindled since the war began: some members have left the country and several men have gone to serve in the army. It’s striking not to see any missionaries at church.
Still, every Sunday, a core group of longtime members gathers, scattered in the small space. An air raid siren went off as one woman started her talk. She didn’t flinch and continued with her message. These howling sounds are so commonplace, that the nervous systems has now learned to calibrate its response based on the type and intensity of the sound. Just the day before, another congregant’s husband had been drafted off the street. The prayers that morning mentioned the blessings for the soldiers and pleas for peace.
Later that day, I walked over to the St. Michael’s Golden-Domed cathedral and monastery, where about 130 men are studying to be priests. I happened upon an Orthodox service with a senior priest chanting the gospel and a younger priest swinging a metal vessel on chains called thurible with incense.
In the Orthodox tradition, the Fifth Sunday of Lent — also when Catholics mark Palm Sunday — is dedicated to the Mary of Egypt, a former sinner who became a desert hermit and is remembered for her repentance and devotion.
This brings the long Lenten journey into a kind of spiritual focus, opening the final stretch before the Holy Week begins for Orthodox Christians. Because palm trees don’t grow in Ukraine, next Sunday, worshippers will bring willow branches to church for Verbna Nedilya or Willow Sunday. For Orthodox Christians, the Holy Week will culminate in Easter celebration on April 12 this year.
What caught my attention during this service were several older women who were keeping busy while everyone else stood still. They were moving quietly throughout the church, cleaning brass candle holders of melted wax and wiping the protective glass covering the icons.
One woman told me she has worked at the St. Michael’s church for 18 years, and she now works two shifts a week. Each shift lasts 12 hours. The pay is small, it’s basically volunteering. Why do it then, I asked her, for so many years?
She described always being pulled to come back. “I can’t be without it,” she told me, referring to the church. Plus, who would want to do this tedious work? She said: “I can’t leave. Who’s going to do this work if it’s not me?”
End notes
On Palm Sunday in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV prayed for Christians in the Middle East. With the wars in Iran and in Ukraine, Pope Leo gave a homily referring to God as the “King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war.”
“He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”